Lephys

Not too much. Beta's progressing, game due out soon, OOoE's at... 781. It's a shame we won't hit triple-8. But oh well. 781's still a good number,

Or what if it boosted your DR also? +10 or something? Increased chance you won't be hit as badly, AND greater damage reduction even if you do? Seems legit. Even makes more sense for the whole "OH NOES! USE GUNS!" lore. I do feel like a 10-second boost to Deflection, just to get it close to average, is a little lame for a Wizard ability. Maybe it could last longer, but degrade over time? Every 5 seconds, it drops off by 5 points of Deflection? Or what if just the DR degraded? Started at like 25, and dropped 5 points with every hit or something? I feel like it should be something you have to actively pierce. Not just a "free" (doesn't use spell slot) per-rest defense buff. I was never much of a fan of the armor-y spells in D&D. They were bland. "It's basically armor minus the arcane spell failure penalties, except you cast it instead of wearing it, u_u..."

Truly? Can you show me a video of this 0-Endurance Barbarian activating Wild Sprint, or this 0-Endurance Fighter engaging (at all,much less effectively engaging) any number of enemies or activating his knockdown? Because that's pretty remarkable that those people whilst lying incapacitated upon the ground. Yes. That sounds nothing like energy. Something that, when you're out of it, you collapse in a lifeless heap, but don't die. But, over time, it recharges, and you're able to do things so long as you have more than 0 of it. What on earth was I thinking... *eye roll* So it isn't perfectly simulated. Hardly means it's entirely dissimilar to energy/stamina/endurance. Besides, all I said was that it was so abstracted, snacks would most likely heal it, rather than your health. Heck, by your reasoning, hit points are "not just a synonym for health." Because, you can have pneumonia and be in poor health, but in a video game, you wouldn't have lost any hitpoints, because you ddidn't get stricken by a sword. There's a lot more to health than "damage," but that doesn't mean hitpoints aren't an abstracted form of health.

I don't really understand the statistics part, as I didn't say anything about statistics being exclusive to anything. Nor did I comment on what Avellone did or did not say, come to think of it. Nor did I say anything about "hand crafted" and "statistics" being mutually exclusive in any way. That... that doesn't even make any sense. If anything ever happens in any number of cases, then statistics exist. Regardless of whether or not something was hand-crafted, or on a console, or spoken of by one named Avellone. See, this is why we can't have nice dialogues, you and I.

^ That's not entirely true. Console and handcrafted are not mutually exclusive terms. Statistics do not = inherent attributes. Yes, 99% of console games that aren't ridiculously simple are big-studio games that are pretty much publisher-guided for maximum mainstream sales, etc. Doesn't mean a true, classic RPG for a console is uncraftable.

*gasp*... They're Homunculi! I knew it!

Well, to be even fairer, as abstracted as "endurance" is, a Monster Energy drink and a Slim Jim would heal "Endurance," but would not stitch up your actual wounds. And fair enough about 8-hours rest, but that's not really nonsensical in function, it's merely obviously exaggerated. As, eventually,, rest would heal your wounds. Or rather, rest + nutrients-and-such = healing. I get that. Just... you can't use radiation to perform any task you want. Yet, magical energy can become fire, or lightning, or can alter your mind, or can speed you up, etc. So the rules of raw magical energy don't seem to follow the rules of any real-world energies very well. Plus, radiation can aid in lots of "healing," but it can't knit your flesh back together and stop your bleeding. Thus, my example, more simply/immediately, was just to point out that just because some energy is powerful enough to do something doesn't automatically make its versatility equal to its power. Anywho, magical energy that can heal wounds is no more inherently wrong than magical energy that can't. It's just two different options for lore, really. Nothing really makes magical healing an obviously existent thing, is all.

Realism FTW! Fable also had fantastic treasure design. "Hey, I know you're 3/4ths of the way through the game, in an area that was closed off until you made it this far, and even some piddly food costs like 100 gold, but check out what's in that super-ultra-secret chest you just dug up! Yeah! 173 gold!!!!!!! YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!" Haha... Ohhhh Fable.

That's what I'm talking about. Betting I can push the playthrough time to about 100 hours, easily. For I am a slowpoke.

English is pretty ridiculous, when you get down to it. A lot of phrases and such can mean many, many different things. Plus, we have way too many sayings that no one even knows the origins of anymore. And that's just American English (or whatever it's called), which is one of the youngest forms of English.

A prescription for his fever, perchance?

Yeah. It seems like a lot of this type of thing will be a lot easier to tweak/re-design once they have the foundation of all these custom assets for the first game in-place. I can imagine starting out in a new engine adds a pretty big penalty to design tweak rolls/checks.

I don't know the math, but Lore is supposed to affect the rate at which you discover enemy stats, basically. I don't think there's any 0 amount, though. I think even with the minimum Lore, you still discover stats about the foe, just at a slower rate. The bestiary is separate from that. I think it's based on kills? But, once you've supposedly done enough killing research on a type of enemy, you get a chunk of XP for completing that bestiary entry. They happen at the same time, but aren't really the same thing, I don't think. Bestiary is XP bonus after so many kills, while discovering enemy stats is just something that happens in combat.

Well, how do you expect the Earth's military to have any money left after spending eleventy billion on that stealth cruiser?! Or in the second game, when they spend ALL of Michael Douglas's money on project Bring One Guy Back To Life? Nah, man. The budget was either stuff, or a ship/ressurection. You can't have your gear and eat it too. u_u

Though not a necessity, that actually adds a nice bit of tactility to something as simple as looting. Kinda anchors you in the game world when it comes to item interaction, since you get a feel of things being hefted/bumping into other things, rather than just "I clicked a button and variable values are moving from not-in-my-inventory code to in-my-inventory code." It was especially satisfying, in the Diablo games, to hear a gemstone drop from a foe, for example. Not that I'm suggesting we get tiny-cyclone sounds for weapons falling to the ground, and treasure sounds every time we kill something and it drops so much as a coin. But just, it was pleasant to hear that sound for that item. "What's that sound? I think it's... VALUE!"

If you need more epicness, you can always just swap in "DOH-vah-KINNN! DOH-vah-KINN!!! HAH-hoh-HEEE-HAH-ho-HAHH... DAH-doh-DAHHHH!" *Note, lyrics may not actually be "hah"s and "dah"s after "doh-vah-kin".*

First time I fought Medreth, BB Wizard tossed out a Web, and it perpetually scrolled Attack Resolutions for all targets involved, forever, from then on out. Even with the game paused, there were still new "BB Wizard (spell name I can't remember because I'm a visual rememberer, but basically Web) -- 1 Hit, 2 Grazes, 1 Crit"s, appearing at a rate of about 7 per second. The weird thing is, they were all different, like it just kept rolling the Resolution or something. So, I reloaded, and fought and beat Medreth's group, only to notice that, halfway through the battle, my combat log stopped displaying anything at all. I THINK reloading fixed it. I was unable to reproduce either bug. 8(... (I'm a failure of a tester, ) Otherwise, liking the new build, in general. Yeah, I wish Interrupts weren't breeding like rabbits, but... I made a melee Wizard, and she rocks! Well, by "rocks," I mean "doesn't die super easily in that first fight unless I do something really dumb." I'm still kinda figuring out what's dumb and what isn't, 'cause I mostly know about all the mechanics, but am not super familiar with them yet, thanks to a severe lack of playtime. Biggest complaint about combat, really, is that it's still kinda hard to tell who's gonna do what when, and who's getting hit by what when. Except for things like Knockdown and such. I think the more intuitive reactionary feedback the game can give us, the better. MUCH more playable for me than 333 was, though. That's the last one I got to play.

Well, for what it's worth, don't feel stupid, 'cause you're not. It's not the most common way to present stuff in a game, so it's just unfamiliar at first is all. Once explained, it makes sense.

While we're talking version numbers, briefly, the final "gold" build needs to be version 888.

Regarding the combat-only thing, I think it's way too heavy-handed. I get what they're going for, and I don't think it's a bad thing to get rid of "Let's cast protection from 30 things and Be Really Awesome At Stuff +5 on everyone for the next 10 hours" and jogging around with that stuff on. BUT, they could've just made it pointless to try and stack so much stuff prior to combat simply by using short-duration buffs. If the longest-lasting buff is a minute, for example (before anyone jumps on me for saying the longest-lasting buff should be 1 minute, and then the game would be perfect), then, by the time you cast like 5 buffs, you've only got half your longest remaining buff left. Meaning others would only have 20 seconds left, maybe. Then, let the player waste as many buffs as they'd like. I mean, if you think it's worth it to stack 5 things just to get 10 seconds of effects out of 30-second buffs, then, by all means, go for it. Stack to your heart's content. But the game isn't preventing you from doing it. It's just not making it very prudent to do so. The only "problem with pre-buffing" is that ridiculously long-term effects can be kind of uninteresting in a way, especially the more of them you're able to stack while you jog around, before you're actually dealing with a combat encounter. Now, even that being said, it's not TOTALLY just-plain bad to be able to have long-term effects. But, it's understandable why some people don't want the way you play a game to just be "make sure we take advantage of meta-knowledge here to go from instantly-annihilated to impervious-to-harm for this next fight." It doesn't really need to be possible to do that, and having shorter-term stuff brings something to the table. But, the bottom line... requiring a combat state to already be achieved before any abilities can be used (ESPECIALLY offensive ones, and things like auras) is producing a lot more negative side effects than just being able to stack pre-buffs all day ever did. Anywho, I look forward to actually playing this build a bit. Haven't had the time to try out the recent ones for the last month and a half.

Obviously, we should go with the DA2 approach, instead, wherein, if you save up every single coin in the entire game and sell everything all the time, you can choose ONE nice thing to purchase. Maybe a staff, or a helmet. Then you're broke again. WOOHOO! Choose wisely!

SHUNNNNNNNNNnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn-uh!!!!!

Well... I mean, Pierce, Freeze, and Burn are damage types. So, once you know that, it's decently clear. I agree that without reading the manual or going through a tutorial that specifically makes it clear what the terminology is up front, it's less clear. But, if it's listing less-than-all the damage types, then the minimum possible reason for that is that the number for DR is different specifically for the listed damage types. To look at it another way, you may have doubted your interpretation, but you still got it correct straight off the bat. Well, except for the plus. Typically, in a game with a ruleset like this, a number you see without a + or - is just a flat value for something. Hence "Pierce 13." That's saying the DR for Pierce is 13. Unless you specifically see a +13, assume that whatever you're dealing with is fixed at 13, and that 13 is not being added to or modifying anything. It'll probably all be a lot clearer when we have a manual/tutorial, though.

This. But then, along the lines of what BrainMuncher was saying, nothing says everything needs to be available as soon as you have the money for it. Even if you could start the game with infinite gold, if the first village you come to has a modest array of leather armors, then, *gasp*, you can adequately outfit yourself with decent protection! And yeah, at a certain point, it's more realistic for some city to have a boatload of goods, ranging all the way up to the highest quality stuff, if you've got the coin. But, as is a big theme in this thread, realism that only serves itself isn't very useful. It'd be more realistic if every time you got a big sword gash, it became gangrenous and you had to amputate it. Or, if you took three arrows, you just bled internally until you died. But, that doesn't support very fun gameplay without the entire rest of the game being designed around not ever getting hit by arrows. Meanwhile, we utilize aspects of realism to determine things like "Hey, a dagger has less reach than a halberd, and a faster attack speed." Doesn't mean we make sure that dagger attacks and halberd attacks work exactly like they do in reality. No, but differing attack speeds and weapon reach provide fun, tactical options in combat. Hence, realism FTW. Not because realism. Because fun gameplay. Limited merchant gold isn't inherently bad. It's just bad if all it does is make merchants not have unrealistically unlimited gold. Realistically, sometimes you wouldn't necessarily be able to find a merchant who would buy something, regardless of how much gold they had, because they didn't think they could sell it, etc. So, even limited gold doesn't make sense if you can just go find another merchant who isn't running on empty.

CONSTANT VIGILANCE! Thank you for all your hard work, you Dili-Gents, you. ^_^ (Seriously, even though I type everything in a silly fashion... it's sincere silliness.)